Why aren’t you broken? Why aren’t you irreparably damaged? That was the question I used to ask everyone I once loved, all the men with whom I slept. They wanted to discover the space between my knees, the soft curve of my shoulder. I wanted to discover their souls.
Each ring of a tree tells you something about its age, how old it is, what it’s been through. So too with human skin. A scar is not just a mark hidden under a sleeve. A scar is an entire story, a dusty volume tucked away on a high shelf safe from prying eyes. When that story wants to be told, it will be. The scar will be uncovered, traced with fingers like a map. I traced every single goddamn scar on those men. On the first man I found needle marks lining his wrists. On the second I found a bracelet of bruises. But: I never asked why. I never asked why.
So many people use climbing a mountain as a metaphor for overcoming an obstacle. Bullshit. When you climb a mountain there’s cold, and there’s snow, and there are numb hands and frozen faces and biting wind. Then there’s the top of the mountain, and you’re up and over it and down again. How many of you reading this have sat in the garage with the lights off and the car running for as long as you could bear it? How many of you have broken every dish in the house, or at least thought about it? How many of you held your bones to the light and found cracks running through them like spiderwebs? How many.
I was not a haunted house. Those men were. Only our bodies tell us where to begin. If we were to become cartographers, there would be one irrevocable place on our maps: home.